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Ray Hedberg: Priorities for the City Council retreat

Posted:
01/18/2018 07:15:15 PM MST

According to the 2016 Community Survey, the highest priority for the city should be "the availability and diversity of affordable housing." Not surprisingly, a survey's design can again place focus on an un-achievable, windmill-tilting, feel-good goal. Affordable housing should not be the focus of the City Council "retreat" on Jan. 19-20.

I commend Jan Burton on her column in the Sunday (Jan. 14) Daily Camera, in succinctly pointing out that the Boulder City Council's primary responsibility is to fund the priorities of the community. As Jan suggests, those priorities are to fund the services that the public counts on (safety, infrastructure, roads, snow removal, minimization of traffic congestion, etc.). The council needs to balance the overall budgets within taxpayer tolerance and abilities. It should carefully challenge the large, ongoing department reserve balances. And it should carefully review the cost, effectiveness and necessity of staff support for the growing number of boards and commissions.

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Just because the appreciated value of properties has been increasing, that must not automatically imply that the city's budget should grow beyond the ability of certain resident groups to afford the tax increases being passed on. The 2016 Community Survey clearly ignored these city's core responsibilities; it appears to have been designed to be a "wild dreams" popularity vote.

Since the basic requirements of the public have not yet been satisfactorily addressed, should suing oil companies, creating a public bank, buying Xcel power poles, searching for additional sister cities, legislating what crops can be grown on city-owned open space, and nibbling at the unsolvable affordable housing scarcity be addressed?

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